The Roost, metered

This page is served by one small ARM board in a closet, alongside every other app on this domain. Here's what that box costs to run — live.

The host — one Orange Pi in a closet

Right now

Estimated draw
CPU load
Memory
Disk
Apps running

connecting to pulse

The box

Idle W
Full-tilt W
Rate ¢/kWh

An Orange Pi 5 class single-board computer: roughly 4–6 W idle, 12–15 W with all eight cores pinned. Draw is estimated as idle + (full − idle) × CPU load; for exact numbers, put a plug meter on it.

What the host costs

Per day
Per month
Per year
Worst case / yr

Worst case assumes every core pinned 24/7 for a year — it never is. Rates prefill from the latest EIA U.S. residential average.

Per app

AppUpMem MBCPU %Est. / month
waiting for pulse…

Idle power is split evenly across running apps; busy apps pay for their own CPU on top. Every app on this domain — including the calculator you came from — is on this meter.

The fleet — every machine on the meter

The whole fleet

Fleet draw
Fleet / month
MachineStatusLoadMem GBDrawEst. / month
waiting for pulse…

Other machines report themselves to pulse every 30 s with roost's node-report.sh — the CI Mac mini is only on the meter while it's awake. Quiet for 2+ minutes counts as asleep, ≈0 W. measured draw comes from the machine's own power sensor (macmon on Apple silicon); est is modeled from CPU load between the idle and full-tilt watts.

Storage

Fleet used
Installed
Rented, this would be

Every disk on the meter — used against installed capacity, reported by each machine alongside its power numbers. Sleeping machines keep their last-reported figures (data doesn't sleep). “Rented” prices the same installed space as big-cloud SSD block storage at ≈8¢ per GB-month, billed on what you provision, not what you fill.

Storage history

Loading history…

Used GB stacked by machine — the top edge is everything the fleet holds. Machines only record while awake, so a sleeping Mac's band drops out until it reports again; capacity itself doesn't change, so flat is good and a creep is a trend.

History

Loading history…

Stacked by machine — the top edge is the whole fleet. pulse records a sample every 30 s (kept 90 days); machines without a power sensor use the same idle/full-tilt model as above. Sleeping machines drop to the baseline.

For scale